Virgin Hotel, slated to open in a couple of years on the block front on Broadway from 29th to 30th Streets, will be a glass building rising 38 stories, Commercial Observer has learned.

The 440,000-square-foot Lam Group-developed hotel will have 489 rooms, three restaurants, banquet space and 100,000 square feet of retail, said Keith Lam, managing director of construction at the Lam Group.

The retail will be on the first four floors, with the fourth floor including 12,000 square feet of outdoor space for a restaurant to lease.

In 2011 and 2012, the Lam Group bought the adjacent 1227 Broadway, 1225 Broadway and 1205 Broadway, across from the trendy Ace Hotel, for $88 million.

“We’re Chinese and the 8 number is a lucky number,” Mr. Lam said.

At one point, the firm had considered constructing two different hotels on the parcels, but now it will be one big Virgin Hotel.

__________________“If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.” ― Isaac Newton

That kind of sucks. The Virgin Hotels site had a small footprint, with tons of air rights, so I was thinking we would get a very tall, skinny tower. I was thinking a 70 floor tower or so. But then they acquired the next-door site, and decided to expand the footprint, so now we're getting a shorter building.

Now we'll just get background filler, so I hope the design is damn good.

The LAM Group filed for permits today for the 38-story, Virgin-branded hotel it is developing in NoMad. The application filed with the city’s Department of Buildings calls for a tower with approximately 400,000 square feet. The building will feature 447 hotel rooms — including two duplexes on the 34th and 35th floors –and 100,000 square feet of retail space, which is currently being marketed by Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. The architect of record is Brian McFarland of VOA Architecture. Developer John Lam paid nearly $88 million in 2011 and 2012 to acquire three properties fronting the entire block of Broadway between 30th and 29th Streets across from the popular Ace Hotel. The developer received approval to demolish the existing buildings on the site late last year.

VOA Architecture will serve as both architect and interior designer, while The LAM Group is the developer behind it. Yaddi, yaddi, yadda. Here's a different shot of what the hotel will look like, including the retail shops.

Sadly, the hotel won't break ground for a few more months which means the opening isn't expected to happen until 2017.

Designed by VOA Associates, we knew that it would be relatively tall for the area and have a cantilever. But here's the first look at the entire hotel, all 38 stories, and the mall-like chunk of retail shops slated for 100,000 square feet of space at its bottom. And thus NoMad's rapid transformation continues.

This is the block as it stands recently, according to Google Street View, on Broadway looking south from 30th Street.

The Virgin Hotel New York that will soon rise at the corner of 30th Street and Broadway will change forever the stretch of Broadway that runs from Madison Square Park to Greeley Square. And, if the renderings are to be trusted, it will be a magnificent piece of work.

I am inclined, however, to hedge my bets. Two things can go wrong in a building like this. First, it can be so poorly made that, even if technically it conforms to all or most of the details of the rendering, the totality of the result will look surprisingly unimpressive.

Second, the skill of the artist who created the rendering may surpass the skill of the architects who designed the structure. The rendering looks wonderful, but in it the hotel is seen from below looking up — the sort of angle that cinematographers call an “epic shot,” pioneered in the early days of Soviet Cinema as a way to transform even the common man into a hero.
For now, however, I am optimistic, especially in the knowledge that however it turns out, this 38-story hotel will surely be better than what it replaces. Designed by VOA Architecture and developed by the Lam Group, it is destined to rise over the ghost of a featureless and unadorned three-story, mid-20th century building.

The Virgin Hotel arrives in an area that, likely because of zoning issues, has become far more welcoming of hotels than of the residential developments that have taken over the rest of the city. It is one block north of Ace New York (just off Broadway) and two blocks north of the Nomad Hotel at Broadway and 28th Street.

But whereas those hotels are distinctly boutique-y and were created by revamping preexisting Beaux-Arts structures, the Virgin will be an entirely new building. In fact, it promises to be one of the bigger hotels in the city, with 460 guest rooms, not including “concept suites.” Among its amenities will be a rooftop bar and swimming pool and a spa. At its base, it promises high-end retail, which, as of today, risks looking stunningly out of place across the street from the wholesale cosmetic and perfume stores and small-time importers that have defined the area for decades.

Surely this new hotel will stand out strikingly, perhaps awkwardly, among the far smaller and older buildings that will surround it. It is by no means a subtle or understated structure; rather, it announces itself with all the force of a polemic. It has a sort of “Mad Men”-era massing that revels in bulk and bullying presence, almost recalling the Pan Am (now MetLife) Building. In sartorial terms, this would be a zoot suit. If it were a car it would be — and I say this by way of praise — the sort that gets “really lousy mileage.” It might even have fins.

The hotel is conceived in two main parts. It has a five-story base, an intricate, transparent sequence of glassy squares and rectangles. By contrast, the upper levels (by far the bulk of the building), read as a shifting mass of deconstructed planes, such as can be seen in many developments around the city over the past 10 or so years. Yet if there is one building that serves as the direct antecedent to this work, I would suggest the excellent Standard Hotel on the High Line, designed by Todd Schliemann, now of Ennead Architects (at the time Polshek Partnership Architects) and completed in 2009. That much-praised building — although completely modernist in its vocabulary — was also aggressively historicist in its resuscitation of ’70s brutalism and in its domineering presence. It is hard to imagine that it was not fully present to the minds of the designers of the Virgin Hotel New York.

Designed by VOA Associates, we knew that it would be relatively tall for the area and have a cantilever. But here's the first look at the entire hotel, all 38 stories, and the mall-like chunk of retail shops slated for 100,000 square feet of space at its bottom. And thus NoMad's rapid transformation continues.

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The average height of luxury residential towers in the vicinity has seen a rapid increase, but hotels have remained fairly restrained in height, with the tallest generally topping out around the 400-foot mark. 1225 Broadway will stand 476 feet tall — hardly short, it will still be relatively visible from the surrounding neighborhood, which is dominated by pre-war mid-rises and the backdrop of the Empire State Building.

Developer Lam Group broke ground today on its 39-story, 465-key Virgin Hotel, slated for Broadway between West 29th and West 30th Streets in NoMad.

Architecture firm VOA Associates has designed the steel and glass tower, which is expected to open in 2018, according to a news release. The cost of construction was not disclosed.

The 500,000-square-foot will include 30,000 square feet of space for amenities such as a banquet hall, meeting spaces, conference rooms, open workspace, restaurants, a rooftop skybar, and a pool and spa.

”The Virgin Hotel New York’s distinctive look is sure to play a key role in the NoMad neighborhood’s transformation process,” Len Cerame, a managing principal of VOA Associates, said in the release.

In 2011 and 2012, Lam Group bought 1227 Broadway, 1225 Broadway and 1205 Broadway, across from the trendy Ace Hotel, for $88 million, as Commercial Observer previously reported. A spokeswoman for Lam Group did not return requests for comment.

The Virgin Hotel location will have 90,000 square feet of retail at the base of the tower, which is being marketed by Newmark Grubb Knight Frank’s Mitch Friedel, Adam Weinblatt and Reed Zukerman.